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NWLSA Student Awards 2016

The North West London Society of Architects (NWLSA) panel attended presentations by undergraduate and postgraduate architecture students for the annual NWLSA Student Awards 2016 on 17th June.

The jury awarded one undergraduate and two postgraduate prizes with £200 each. The projects were selected to demonstrate community engagement with real clients and how quality design can be combined with excellent social engagement, entrepreneurship and activism.

The following students and projects have been selected and will be awarded at the opening of the Architecture Summer Show on 23rd June:

Studio 10 – "InterAct": The project started last academic year by reframing the area around the Roman Road in East end of London as a spine to a ‘Civic Neighbourhood’. It formed its identity through local collaborative practices, tapping into the vibrant mix of social diversity and local underused spaces.

Alastair Greig (Free Unit) – "More Than a View": The west coast of Scotland is renowned for its natural beauty and rich history. However, like much of rural Scotland, Skipness village and country-estate are a community in flux. The clients, the custodians of the estate, struggle to cover costs of upkeep. Most young people leave to find employment and community cohesion has suffered. "More Than a View" encourages a way of life that is linked to its surroundings, taking the presence of nature at Skipness and using it as an educational resource. Rather than advocate the breaking up of the estate, this project employs the experience and drive of the existing landowners as a platform for focused regeneration. By involving a wider group in the management of the land, the established dualities of public/private, work/home and resident/visitor are broken down. Inspired by the motto Ecology, Creativity, Community, Economy – four interventions aim to engage residents and visitors with a privately owned estate, fostering a greater sense of belonging and responsibility towards the land and each other.

Chloe Anderson & Sogand Babol (Free Unit) – "Conditional School": Reflective of practice, this joint thesis intended to reconstruct a school in volatile, post-earthquake Nepal. Guided by the Free Unit, tools and provocations were made to develop early stages in dialogue with the whole place to ask questions, make relationships, build trust and learn with others. But with the first phase of construction imminent, the emergence of a competing organisation on the site reconstituted the project. Pre-approved type designs highlighted a cycle of aid dependency demanding consideration of global influence on local lives. The project interacts with this condition, promoting school building as a way of hosting learning for the whole town, alongside a new set of guiding mantra for the process of design and construction.